Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations bkrike on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

corrupted PST file

Status
Not open for further replies.

Shift838

IS-IT--Management
Jan 27, 2003
987
US
I have a PST file that may be corrupted or it may be a by FAT table. I beleive it is a bad FAT32 table but not sure. I have tried to run the inbox repair tool but give me an error stating it has encounted an error preventing it from reading the file and to run scan disk. Run scandisk tells me the disk cannot be fixed. is there anything I can do. I have heard a backup of the FAT32 table is stored on the drive somewhere. can it be restored?
 
This is one of those incidents that I take as a reminder to review my backup routines, etc.

Whatever the cause of the scandisk message might be, if you don't have a backup/copy of your files on some different medium, eg. external HDD, CD/-RW, DVD..., I'd take care of that before anything else.

Start>Run: ntbackup /? for Windows Backup Help.

If this should be a HDD problem your best option might be reformat & clean install.

It may be a good idea to run the manufacturer's HDD utility to check the status. You can also use these utilities to recondition a faulty drive. It may fix the bad sectors or not but maybe it's time to consider getting a new HDD?!


TomCologne

 
search your computer for a program named scanpst.exe it will repair your damaged pst files...

you may want to also do a scandisk.exe to see if you have any disk errors.

there is a KB on this but I'm not sure.. just look for "corrupt pst" and I'm sure you'll find it
 
I have tried to use the inbox repair tool and it does not even get through phase 1 before it gives me a file read error. I beleive I have lost it completely. It's not my pst file it's a friends. I have stressed to him that it is really too big. it is right at 2gb..
 
you can try to see if data recovery software can pull it out of the ashes.

google for GetDataBack -- its only about $80
 
Chris77504,

I'm not sure if this might help, but the first step of doing a scandisk. When we get an error saying that Chkdsk can not be run, we try to do a defrag. Usually, after a defrag (it was pretty bad)then Chkdsk will run.

Now, for the PST - yes, the hard limit of 2GB has been covered before. As others have posted, there are other possible fixes/patches/work arounds. Good luck.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top